Case study

Pompidou Centre CULTURE

The Pompidou Centre in Paris is a world-famous cultural Key facts

centre and home to France’s National Museum of Modern Art.
Organisation
Its reputation and high profile make it a prime target for spam, Pompidou Centre,
but since the installation of a Sophos Email Security Appliance, National Museum of Modern Art
the flood of unwanted emails to the Centre’s employees has Location
dried to a trickle. Paris, France

No of users
1000

Solution
Sophos ES4000 Email Security
Appliance

The Pompidou Centre at night

Architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers
(Photo G. Meguerditchian)

Business challenge
With six million visitors per year, the
Pompidou Centre in Paris is one of the
world’s most popular tourist attractions.
More than one thousand employees work
in its National Museum of Modern Art
and cinemas and run its busy programme
of cultural performances and seminars.
The Centre’s powerful IT system houses
a database of the museum’s entire
collection. Its IT department employs
30 staff, including a dedicated team
for exhibitions. In 2005 the Centre
installed an Ethernet Gigabit network and
introduced a strict security policy.
However, following this implementation, “Not only has the
the performance of the Centre’s anti-virus Sophos ES4000 almost
and anti-spam solutions at the gateway completely rid our
failed to deliver effective protection.
system of spam without
generating false positives,
According to the Pompidou Centre’s IT
director, Olivier Bielecki, “Email filtering
but its remote monitoring
was ineffective, and administration was and assistance has
too complicated to allow individual significantly reduced our
users to manage their own quarantined maintenance workload.”
messages. An administrator had to check
everything daily, resulting in many calls Olivier Bielecki, Director of
to IT from frustrated users who had been Information Systems,
denied access to important email.” Pompidou Centre
Pompidou Centre CULTURE

Faced with wasted time, falling productivity and unhappy
users, the Pompidou Centre decided to revamp its gateway
security. The main priorities were better efficiency and
customisable administration options.
Technology solution
The provision of gateway security was put out to tender,
and although bids were received from six different
software companies, the Pompidou Centre opted for the
Sophos ES4000 Email Security Appliance. This managed
appliance came top for performance, ease of management
and installation. Featuring an intuitive web interface and
automated protection updates every five minutes, the
ES4000 protects the email gateway from the growing threat
of viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, spam, and policy abuse.
After two weeks of tests, during which the ES4000 protected
the IT department’s email gateway without users’ knowledge,
Sophos was confirmed as the best choice.
Business results
After an initial test phase involving the Pompidou Centre’s
30 IT staff, the ES4000 was rolled out to the entire
system of over 1000 users. The results were instant, and
impressive. Some users saw their daily dose of spam
email fall from 200 messages per day to just two or three.
More importantly, there were no more complaints to the
IT department about “false positive” messages. “It was
a huge relief for the system administrators, who had less
quarantine management to do, and no more calls from angry
users,” said Oliver Bielecki. “The system’s flexibility allows
us to delegate quarantine management to users, which
dramatically increases our user satisfaction.”
The Pompidou Centre also chose to make use of the
ES4000’s remote monitoring and on-demand remote
assistance feature, and delegate the majority of appliance
maintenance tasks to Sophos.

“We chose to use an appliance because we did not want to
install software on our system, and wanted to reduce the
need for monitoring, which is now carried out remotely by
Sophos”, said Olivier Bielecki. “We were also impressed
by the service support provided by Sophos and its partner,
SEREN-IT.”
“The Sophos appliance met our IT needs perfectly. It ticked
all the right boxes – simple installation, efficiency, reinforced
security, a lighter administrative workload, and improved
user satisfaction,” said Oliver Bielecki. “Now we have time
to concentrate on our essential IT management tasks, and on
our core business – the Pompidou Centre.”

The Sophos ES4000 appliance is one of the latest

generation of enterprise-class gateway solutions, designed
to deliver superior email protection in a compact, intelligent
and easy-to-manage format. The monitoring and remote
support provided by Sophos give benefits that are more
usually associated with a managed service. This total
solution met the Pompidou Centre’s specifications perfectly,
allowing a reduction in maintenance workload without
compromising security measures. Features such as remote
“heartbeat” monitoring, exception-driven alerting, automatic
capacity optimisation and on-demand remote assistance
combine to deliver the industry’s most dependable and
effective gateway security.

To find out how Sophos products can help protect your

organisation, visit www.sophos.com/products

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